Population Health as a Fundamental Criterion of Social Ecology

This essay elaborates the common insight that “strong” communities respond more successfully to serious threats than “weak” communities and it claims that the successful communities will have better population health rates. It nominates an appropriate measure of population health as the criterion of success, and advances a universally applicable concept of strength, conceptualized as institutionalized problem-solving capacity, based on three components: the application of specialized knowledge, open debate on policy alternatives and mobilization behind reformers and reform movements. The relationship may be compressed into a threat-capacity ratio interaction formula: ph = C/t where ph is a measure of population health, C is problem-solving capacity and t is one or more existential threats. The community is the locus of causality and it is assumed that communities attempt to adapt to threats by problem-solving. The Threat-Capacity dynamic is explained by a combination of neo-Darwinian and neo-Durkheimian theory. Three kinds of applications support its plausibility.